Ryan Hamilton is used to standing in front of a crowd.
He was a touring musician for years, making up half of two different Dallas duos. England was where he found his fans, so after leaving the music scene he accepted a gig as a radio host with the United Kingdom’s Jorvik Radio. He broadcasts his show from his rural North Texas home, highlighting throwback tunes by bands like Tripping Daisy, Third Eye Blind and Oasis.
So, over the course of his life in the limelight, he’d had experience with a hater or two. But nothing could have compared to the onslaught of hate he received after publicizing the details of his wife’s miscarriage, which nearly resulted in her death after she was denied care because of Texas’ abortion laws last spring.
Hamilton has detailed the experience of finding his wife unconscious, bloody and near death in personal essays, TV interviews and on his podcast, CORRECT, which delves into the reproductive rights conversation with elected officials and medical professionals. With each CNN interview and podcast episode, Hamilton’s crowd becomes bigger, and not everyone is a fan. He’s cemented himself as a leading male voice in the abortion access conversation and painted a target on his back for extreme conservatives in one fell swoop.
For every message of support in his social media comments, there's another calling Hamilton a liar, a political plant, an opportunist.
“I didn’t know it was rare for a man to speak up about this,” Hamilton told the Observer. “I handle [the hate] better now than I did at the beginning. There's been a serious learning curve, because at first I was so angry I just wanted to fight back, and now my anger has direction and purpose.”
The Men Speaking Out About the Women’s Issue
Last month at the Democratic National Convention, Josh Zurawski, a Texas man whose wife developed a life-threatening infection after she was denied abortion care, had a message for voters: “This isn’t just a woman’s fight,” Zurawski told the national audience. “We need to vote as if lives are depending on it, because they are.”
Reproductive rights are center-stage this election season thanks to the 2022 Dobbs decision, which repealed Roe vs. Wade and allowed Texas and 13 other states to implement a near-total abortion ban. While state leaders like Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton say the state law allows for exceptions such as the life of the mother, abortion access advocates say the reality is this: Doctors are being threatened with fines, jail time and losing their licenses if they don’t comply with an ambiguous law, and women are being directly harmed.
And as more and more families experience what Hamilton’s did — the death of a child who was wanted and the mother being turned away from the hospital until she, too, is nearly dead — more and more men are speaking out about abortion access. It's a conversation that, until now, has been spearheaded by Texas women such as Wendy Davis, Kate Cox and Amanda Zurawski.
“Why are our wives and daughters and sisters expected to go out and relive their nightmares?” Hamilton said. “[In Texas], men are upset about the economy and immigration. Men do not talk about women’s reproductive rights, they consider it a women’s issue. What that says to me, and probably to the women in their lives, is that the lives of the women they love don’t matter as much as the price of their groceries.”
Reaching men who do not think abortion access or reproductive rights apply to them was a topic of conversation during the fifth episode of Hamilton’s podcast, which featured U.S. Representative Colin Allred. Allred is campaigning for a Senate seat in November, and state polling shows him neck-and-neck with Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. Through consistent campaign messaging, Allred has been hammering the idea that he and Cruz have very little in common, politically and personally.
“It seems like a cliche that in the past, [men] only started to speak up once they have a daughter or once it started to directly affect their personal situation. It shouldn't matter that I'm the father of a daughter. It shouldn't matter that I have sisters.” — Alex Clark, board member, Dallas County Young Democrats
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In the past, Cruz has been vocal about his support for stricter abortion bans, but he’s remained mostly silent in the last year as Texas women have come forward about the negative impact state laws have had on their pregnancies. When Amanda Zurawski talked about her experience before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a committee on which both Cruz and Texas Sen. John Cornyn sit, neither was present.
“I was pro-choice before becoming a father, but I think when you go through the process of a pregnancy, and you go to the ultrasound appointments and the genetic testing appointments, you see just how many times, at so many different points, something can go wrong," Allred told the Observer. "I think it just drives home for you that this is a fundamental decision that has to be between a woman, her family, her faith and her doctor.”
Pro-life proponents have often touted their religion as the basis for their belief, but Allred, who is a Christian, says his faith has informed his personal values, including his belief in personal freedom. On the podcast episode, he and Hamilton agreed that appealing to that sense of individual freedom could be a key strategy in reaching Texas men who are not involved in the reproductive rights conversation.
In addition to being vocal about his belief in reinstating federal abortion access protection, Allred has used his platform while campaigning to bring attention to the impacts of Texas’ abortion ban. At a Dallas rally last month, Allred was joined on stage by plaintiffs from the Zurawski v. Texas case, Kate Cox and white-coated OB-GYN doctors who testified to their experiences under the statewide abortion ban.
Allred, alongside other high-profile men joining the reproductive rights conversation, could help turn the tide in the upcoming election, said Samuel Dickman, chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood of Montana. Whether it will create a large enough wave, though, is the major question yet to be answered.
“I think what Doug Elmhoff and other high-profile, celebrity men have done to talk about and help destigmatize abortion care is actually really helpful,” Dickman told the Observer. “There have been men talking about abortion for a long time, but it seems like it's really picked up in salience over the last year or two just since Dobbs.”
Reinstating a National Protection for Abortion Access
Dickman is an abortion care provider who practiced in San Antonio and Fort Worth early in his career. Then, in 2021, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 8 — also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act — which banned abortions after six weeks across the state. Dickman was on edge, and by the time oral arguments in the Dobbs decision were completed in December 2021, it became “very clear” that the near-total abortion ban in Texas would go into effect.
The summer of 2022, while the Supreme Court was issuing a 6–3 decision to repeal federal abortion protections outlined in Roe v. Wade, Dickman was moving to Montana, where the state Supreme Court has ruled that the right to an abortion is technically protected in the state constitution.
In moving, Dickman was likely trying to avoid being put into a position like the one Hamilton’s wife’s doctors were in. At the time, Hamilton believed the doctors were “scared and unsure” when presented with his wife’s miscarriage. Later, “it felt like they were trying to navigate something that they weren't sure how to navigate.”
“They told my wife that it was not enough of an emergency to perform a D&C [dilation and curettage], and that's an important statement because what they're saying is she's not close enough to death,” Hamilton said. “A D&C — the procedure my wife desperately needed — whether it's for an elective abortion or for an incomplete miscarriage, is still medically coded as abortion care. I’ve learned that's why it gets so complicated for doctors in Texas, because even in my wife's case, an incomplete miscarriage is still technically [abortion care].”
In November, Montana voters will have the chance to emphatically enshrine abortion protections in their state constitution. Nine other states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and South Dakota — are giving voters the chance to do the same.
As states scramble to codify abortion access in their constitutions or ban it completely, Allred has remained consistent: the answer is federal protection. He believes that the standard outlined in Roe v. Wade should be what lawmakers vow to return to, and that “fundamental rights” should not change from state to state.
“We've been through this before in this country not that long ago when we had Jim Crow laws restricting the rights of African Americans in the South,” Allred said. “What we arrived at was a consensus that fundamentally, there are certain rights that should be better protected by the Constitution that have to be national in nature.”
But Alex Clark, a lawyer and board member of the Dallas County Young Democrats, believes that, contrary to recent events, even Texas could be ready to enshrine abortion access on a state level down the road.
"When you go through the process of a pregnancy, and you go to the ultrasound appointments and the genetic testing appointments, you see just how many times, at so many different points, something can go wrong. I think it just drives home for you that this is a fundamental decision that has to be between a woman, her family, her faith and her doctor." — Congressman Colin Allred
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Clark grew up in Sherman, Texas, and, like many small-towners, defaulted to the “pro-life” side. Then in college he experienced a classic widening of his worldview. He was drawn into reproductive rights advocacy after Wendy Davis’ landmark filibuster in 2013 and has now been politically active for over a decade.
Clad in pink sneakers, Davis stood on the Texas House floor for 11 hours to block Republicans from passing legislation that would outlaw abortions after 20 weeks and close the majority of abortion centers across the state. To this day, she stands as an example of the Lone Star State’s strong Democratic presence that Clark believes could win a victory on abortion access, if it gets onto a ballot anytime soon.
“We're not the reddest state in the country. Not even close,” Clark told the Observer. “If places much more conservative than Texas can win [abortion access] referendums, it's really a failure of imagination to think that it could never happen here. It's a failure of imagination to say that we cannot bring back basic abortion rights and freedoms and protections to Texans.”
Unlike Clark and Allred, Dickman is more skeptical of the political future for abortion access rights. While in medical school, he never believed Roe v. Wade would be overturned. He never thought a ban like S.B. 8 would be possible.
Witnessing both has “tempered” the lifelong optimism he’s had for America.
Although reproductive rights advocacy has peaked in enthusiasm, he doesn’t believe that the anti-abortion side has disappeared. They just might be working behind the scenes.
“We saw Donald Trump on TV during the debate [last week] saying that he was unwilling to commit to vetoing a national abortion ban. There's a reason he said that and that's because of the, I think, persistent pressure from this very extreme anti-abortion wing of politics,” Dickman said. “I think that’s still a very powerful force, and I don’t think they represent anywhere close to the majority of Americans, but they still have a hold on politicians like Donald Trump.”
The Voices of the Fathers
Hamilton, Josh Zurawski and many of the husbands who have been negatively impacted by Texas’ abortion ban share a similar heartbreaking line: We wanted this baby.
Names had been chosen, nurseries had been painted and strollers had been purchased when something, on an intangible, biological level, went wrong. The pain of that loss was then compounded by the trauma of not receiving medical care, they say. But Hamilton has been able to use that hurt as fuel for his advocacy.
“I think the thing is, I need this terrible thing that happened to us to mean something. It can’t just be this terrible thing that happened and we’re going to carry it with us for the rest of our lives,” Hamilton said. “If I can take the terrible thing and make it mean something, it’ll make it a little more bearable.”
Lots of new followers since the CNN interview this morning.
— Ryan Hamilton (@TheRyanHamilton) September 9, 2024
Hi. Glad you’re here.
Why do I continue speaking out?
THIS is why. I thought any father would do the same. 🙌🏻💙 #girldad #ReproductiveRights #AbortionIsHealthcare pic.twitter.com/x4GsA0mCcO
When it comes to getting more men involved in talking about abortion access, advocacy should not be automatically delegated or expected of those who have experienced a familial tragedy, Clark said. He also warns that if men who have not been subject to an abortion-access tragedy believe they are exempt from the movement, it won’t reach its full potential.
He is a father whose family has been “extraordinarily blessed” with healthy pregnancies, but he believes his contribution to advocating for abortion-rights is pivotal.
“It seems like a cliche that in the past, [men] only started to speak up once they have a daughter or once it started to directly affect their personal situation,” Clark said. “It shouldn't matter that I'm the father of a daughter. It shouldn't matter that I have sisters.”
But Hamilton believes that being a father of a daughter is exactly what has made his dedication to advocating for change so unrelenting. On his podcast, on social media, to the nationwide crowd he now has standing before him, his message is this: Men must start speaking up.
“There's this switch that got flipped inside of me that I didn't know that I had. What happened to my wife cannot only never happen to her again, I will make sure it never happens to my daughter,” Hamilton said. “There is no chance, as this little girl’s protector, that I can be quiet or comfortable knowing that it’s possible for something to happen to her like what happened to her mom.”
